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What’s with everyone saying that social media is bad these days? I seriously don’t see it, there are so many things that it allows us to do that couldn’t be done before. Messaging is a great example of this. Messaging people is so easy and so immediate; you send a message through the internet and bang it’s there. Oh, and it’s so easy to share photos and moments in your life as they happen so that people can share your experiences, find out what you are up to and they don’t have to be where you are! How awesome is that! Keep reading below if you want to find out more reasons why I think social media is a great thing today.

The ease of messaging and the messaging apps available is one of the great advantages of social media. In 2016, messaging is becoming so much easier to use and associate with. If you just want to send texts or pictures, they’ve got apps for that. WhatsApp is a very common texting app that sends on average a total of 42 billion messages a day (Expanded Ramblings, 2016). Snapchat on the other hand is a very common picture sending app where the message only lasts 10 seconds. Snapchat has an average of 9000 Snapchats sent per second (Extended Ramblings, 2016), which illustrates how popular its use is. With so many people using social media daily, your friends included, it means you can easily connect with your friends and they can be local, interstate or overseas.

The second great thing about social media is the ability to follow your favourite people in the world. This includes celebrities, musicians, athletes, bloggers, family and friends. Social media can help you find a common ground with so many different people. For example, you follow Mr. Yeezy himself Kanye West on Facebook and you see common likes with one of your friends. This gives you something to talk about that’s cool and provides a great way of strengthening real life friendships. The other positive thing about following these celebrity accounts, is that a lot of them have an uploading schedule. Now the celebrities may be making a lot of money off these scheduled posts but they keep their fans entertained almost every day (Lockhart, 2013) and allows us some insights into the lives of the rich and famous. Without social media, we did not get access to this type of information. Social media is always reliable and there is always something to read and learn about. Even if they don’t have this uploading schedule, a lot of them post a lot anyway and its entertaining because its so different to your own life.

Thirdly, social media informs us of breaking news from around the world in real time. We can read so much stuff on social media that it helps us improve our language, especially if you don’t read books or other reading material. There are lots of things on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram such as; news articles, funny posts and random posts and photos that are available to read and view from across the world so you learn about other countries and what is happening in these places (Caumant, Anderson, 2014). I believe that this has improved my vocabulary and knowledge as it exposes us to new words and parts of the English language that we may not have seen before. At ANU, one of the top universities in Australia, they use Facebook to communicate between teachers and students. Social media is not just taken up by the younger generation, but used by people who are of varying ages; young and old. Education is used on it extensively. According to McGraw Hill, 70% of students say that the technology they use to study should be tailored around their social media feeds (McGraw Hill, 2015). In this regard, social media is a good thing as students want to see the stuff they are learning on their feed, which gives them very easy access. Education is one of the most important things in life and if it is tied to social media then students will learn while just browsing.

Social media is a good thing; it has many different uses and purposes and offers different communication mediums i.e. use of apps such as Snapchat and WhatsApp. It enables us to connect with world events and people and enables us to stay up to date. Social media isn’t just used for messaging though; it is used for so many things such as following your favourite celebrities, athletes, friends and groups and just random people you find cool. It can be used for educational purposes and general news, which should be enough to convince you that social media is a great thing and we are privileged to have it. Social media is so much more these days than just stupid photos and people complaining about their lives. It is a place where everyone can be and which everyone can use and not feel judged about the nit-picky things in their life.